ABSTRACT
However large the differences were, the two autocracies in Germany, the National Socialist (NS) regime and the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) regime, can be differentiated from other forms of non-democratic systems as ideocracies. Presumably, the conservative historian Heinrich Leo (1799-1878) from Halle coined this expression in his Naturlehre des Staates for those regimes which, similar to the theocracies already known from Antiquity, placed themselves completely in the service of a fanatic doctrine of salvation.1 In the nineteenth century, Johann Caspar Bluntschli contributed to the circulation of the term2 which was to play a certain role in the discussions concerning the systems of the twentieth century seen as ‘totalitarian’.3
In recent times, authors such as Peter Bernholz, Jaroslav Piekalkievicz and Alfred Wayne Penn have revived it in order to reduce the ruling entities oriented along a ‘monistic’ ideology to a common denominator.4
